STARWEST 2018 Concurrent Session : Troubleshooting and Understanding Modern Systems: Tools Testers Need

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Thursday, October 4, 2018 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Troubleshooting and Understanding Modern Systems: Tools Testers Need

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Successful agile testers collaborate with programmers as code is written, isolating problems, troubleshooting defects, and debugging code all along the way to getting the product to done. But modern systems are scaling beyond what traditional teams are able to understand using familiar tools. New appreciation for systems and complexity theory, as well as disciplines and tools around emerging areas such as observability and resilience engineering, are offering solutions that allow teams to actively debug their systems and explore properties and patterns they have not defined in advance. Chris will share the basics of the theory of these new ideas, as well as some tools that support this type of work. He'll show how dynamic analysis can be used to isolate and understand puzzling system behavior. You will learn how testers—even those without programming skills—can actively collaborate when troubleshooting, debugging, and building a solid understanding of the systems their teams are developing.

Chris Blain
Medidata Solutions, Inc.
Chris Blain has twenty-two years of experience working in software development, on projects ranging from embedded systems to cloud applications. He offers students and companies a powerful mix of real-world experience and the latest research knowledge. He has worked as an engineering manager, test manager, developer, coach, and test architect in a wide variety of domains, including developer tools, security, test and measurement, regulated health care, real-time systems, and large-scale distributed systems. Chris is a former board member of the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference and a regular conference speaker and instructor. His main interests are testing, distributed systems, programming languages, and helping teams deliver higher-quality software.